The project presented here is part of an international researchers group, with a research proposal called ‘Cultures juveniles à l’ère de la globalisation’, which aims to develop a comparative study from the cultural globalization perspective for the construction of aesthetic cosmopolitanism among young people from France, Canada, Australia and Brazil. This project is led by the Department of Forecasting of Research and Statistics of the Ministry of Culture and Communication of France, through Sylvie Octobre, and Professor Vincenzo Cicchelli, from GEMASS (Groupe des Méthodes d’Etude de l’Analyse Sociologique de la Sorbonne ) / CNRS and the University of Paris 4.

We intend to discuss how young people build representations of themselves and their relationships with the world, through the consumption of cultural goods, whether globalized or localized. We seek evidence to demonstrate if they develop an aesthetic posture that can be considered as a process of building a look towards the other. In other words, we aim to understand the cultural-aesthetic cosmopolitanism, analyzing cultural consumption (music, TV, movies, series, newspapers / magazines, comics, books, video games, blogs / sites, social networks), and experiences with the global culture through which young people build their criteria of judgment, knowledge and imagination of the other.

For the project in Brazil, we included the consideration of the Latin American hybrid reality. We start from this perspective to discuss if the construction of a cosmopolitan posture among young people in the region takes place in peripheral or central experiences, according to the homogenizing global flows or local movements. For this, we began our studies in São Paulo, a global city, for the comparison to other central realities of global cities (as in Paris), and then we will continue, by understanding the reality in different cities of the country (Rio de Janeiro, Porto Alegre, Belo Horizonte and Recife).

As main products, the group plans to develop several publications, among them a book for the series “Youth in a Globalizing World”, by the Publisher Brill, to develop this research nationally in partnership with SESC and its research center, and consolidate the international project´s partnership with the research groups in France, Canada, Australia, and researchers of the international thematic group, the United Kingdom, the United States and Israel.